Open participation through a fast Internet

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Monthly Archives: May 2007

Seven years ago, the neighborhood’s homeowners association, set up by
the developer Van Metre Homes, inked an exclusive deal with OpenBand,
a small Dulles firm, to provide Internet, cable and phone service to
all 1,100 homes. Residents say they are now locked into an expensive,
decades-long contract for second-rate services.

Erika Hodell-Cotti, who lives on Sunstone Court, says she cannot work
from home because her Internet connection frequently fizzles out. The
teenagers who live next door play online Xbox games at friends’ houses
where speeds are faster. Dozens of neighbors have installed satellite
dishes on their roofs and backyard decks, fed up with cable channels
that sometimes dissolve into snowy static.

The problem appears to be that the provider used a single technology
and now has no incentive to upgrade.
I suppose this is another example of how what Internet participants
actually want is the Internet, not a specific delivery technology.
A better contract, requiring the provider to at least keep up with
prevailing standards, would have helped a lot.

As most of you know, we have been engaged in a battle with several
major telecom carriers over the last few months. While we continue to
take every precaution to safeguard our customers, several have
undoubtedly been affected by the carriers’ strong-arm battle tactics.
Their decision to block incoming calls to our conferencing and
voicemail numbers interrupted thousands of users including small
businesses, non-profits, universities and entrepreneurs alike. We have
taken this issue to the courts, the government and the press, but the
pivotal difference has been the outcry and support from our customers.
The Federal Communications Commission, the State Attorney Generals and
the telecom giants heard your collective voice and agreed to stop all
call blocking. We would like to thank you for getting involved and
colleague. Together we can redefine the communications industry!

“This is not some virtual world. This is part of our independence. And these attacks were an attempt to take one country back to the cave, back to the Stone Age.”
Linnar Viik, an Estonian government IT consultant to the Washington Post.

A society is its communications, and increasingly the Internet is the
matrix of those communications.
Such communications are virtual only in the same sense that society
is virtual.
And it doesn’t take an attack by a foreign power to disrupt those
communications.
Too few ISP owners can reduce participatory communications
to limited broadcast, just as has already happened in radio.

The average broadband download speed in the US is only 1.9 megabits per
second, compared to 61 Mbps in Japan, 45 Mbps in South Korea, 18 Mbps
in Sweden, 17 Mpbs in France, and 7 Mbps in Canada, according to the
Communication Workers of America.

Deployed troops can still post their videos to YouTube, despite the recently announced Pentagon ban against accessing that site and ten others from government computers. The trick, says Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, is to use your own internet access or visit one of the rec center internet cafes, which plug into separate, commercial networks. The ban, she says, applies only to the 5 million computers worldwide connected to the official Department of Defense intranet.

The Defense Department isn’t trying to “muzzle” troops by banning
YouTube and MySpace on their networks, a top military information
technology officer tells DANGER ROOM. Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight,
Deputy Commander of Joint Task Force-Global Network Operations, says
that the decision to block access to social networking, video-sharing,
and other “recreational” sites is purely at attempt to “preserve military
bandwidth for operational missions.”

Computer_center_400x Not that the 11 blocked sites are clogging networks
all that much today, she adds. But YouTube, MySpace, and the like “could
present a potential problem,” at some point in the future. So the
military wanted to “get ahead of the problem before it became a problem.”

Pointing out the tiny little problem with globalization,
namely that with fast global data networks many jobs
from doctors and lawyers to clerks become offshoreable,
an economist tries to look ahead:

What else is to be done? Trade protection won’t work. You can’t block
electrons from crossing national borders. Because U.S. labor cannot
compete on price, we must reemphasize the things that have kept us on
top of the economic food chain for so long: technology, innovation,
entrepreneurship, adaptability and the like. That means more science and
engineering, more spending on R&D, keeping our capital markets big and
vibrant, and not letting ourselves get locked into “sunset” industries.

If this is the case, then it would seem that promoting innovation
by promoting a fast, open, and participatory Internet would be important
for the U.S., and also important to the rest of the rest of the world
that wants the U.S. to remain a major market.

This is a kind of thing that can happen when the regulators
aren’t really interested in regulating:

When Jon Oberg, a Department of Education researcher, warned in 2003
that student lending companies were improperly collecting hundreds of
millions in federal subsidies and suggested how to correct the problem,
his supervisor told him to work on something else.

Jon Oberg, a former Department of Education researcher, warned that
student loan companies were abusing a subsidy program and collecting
millions in federal payments to which they were not entitled.

The department “does not have an intramural program of research on
postsecondary education finance,” the supervisor, Grover Whitehurst,
a political appointee, wrote in a November 2003 e-mail message to
Mr. Oberg, a civil servant who was soon to retire. “In the 18 months
you have remaining, I will expect your time and talents to be directed
primarily to our business of conceptualizing, competing and monitoring
research grants.”

This is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while.
Time-Warner CEO Richard Parsons says:

“The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We
are the Sioux Nation. They will lose this war if they go to war. The
notion that the new kids on the block have taken over is a false
notion.”

Which is amusing enough.
Time-Warner thinks the cablecos and telcos are the original
natives of the Internet?
I beg to differ.
Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, etc. are much more in the spirit of the
original creators of the Internet technology and of the
people who originally commercialized and privatized the Internet.
Continue reading →

Speed is trivial — the dial up modem completely trounced the entire
Interactive TV industry thanks to the web which gave people a reason
to find their own solutions without waiting for a service provider to
deign to provision a path. As long as you don’t over-defined the
solution you’ll get speed — it’s hard not to.

Yes, back in the 1990s, video on demand and interactive TV were
the big plans of the cablecos and telcos.
They tried it.
Users didn’t buy it.
Instead, participants bought modems and the web boomed.
Continue reading →